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On October 10th, in a cabin on a sleeper train operated by Ukrainian Railways, I found myself sitting across from a quiet young man named Klim Milchenko. The train had set out from his home town of Zaporizhzhia, a city in southeastern Ukraine, at 8:48 P.M. the night before. About sixteen hours later, after travelling more than five hundred miles, it made a stop in Lviv, where I boarded. Milchenko and I were both bound for Poland. I was going to Kraków, on a hastily planned vacation. Milchenko was en route to Wrocław, where his mother lives. I planned to return to Ukraine in ten days. Milchenko didn’t know if he would ever go back.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, the Ukrainian government barred nearly all men between the ages of eighteen and sixty from leaving the country. This year, on August 28th, it lifted the ban for men under the age of twenty-three. Milchenko was twenty-two—he was on the train that day because he wanted to get out while he legally still could. Never mind that the current age for draft eligibility in Ukraine is twenty-five. The government had already lowered the age once, in April of 2024. Who’s to say it won’t lower it again? Not wanting to wait to find out—and, in the meantime, risk being killed by a drone or missile in one of Russia’s frequent attacks on Ukrainian cities—Milchenko decided to leave. He told me that he didn’t feel guilty about it. “When you have friends who have been killed, when you see how soldiers are living on the front line, when you see how that could be your life, it’s a very scary thing,” he said. “Maybe it’s selfish, but I just want to stay alive.”

Milchenko was living in Kyiv when the travel rules changed. He began packing up his apartment the next day. He sold his Yamaha scooter and said goodbye to his two remaining friends, both of whom were staying in Ukraine only because they were too old to go. He then took a bus to Zaporizhzhia to see his father, a fifty-year-old businessman who owns a small shopping center in the city. On Milchenko’s second day home, draft officers picked up his father during a traffic stop and took him to a conscription center. Milchenko went with his grandmother to visit him two days later. “My grandma was nervous,” he said. “She was afraid they might take me, too.” Milchenko was pleased to find his father in good spirits. He told Milchenko that he wasn’t sure where he’d be sent to serve, but that it wouldn’t be the front line. “When we left, I felt like he would be O.K.,” Milchenko said.

Milchenko boarded the train to Poland with two backpacks. (He had mailed ahead a large box of clothes.) He spent most of the journey sleeping and watching YouTube on his phone. When we were thirty minutes from the border, a steward came by to tell us to be ready with our travel documents. Milchenko had been preparing himself for this moment for weeks. He had checked, and double-checked, that his military registration, which Ukrainian men get when they turn seventeen, was up to date and had watched informational videos posted on TikTok about, among other things, what to say to Polish immigration officials. “If they ask you how long you plan to stay,” a job recruiter advises in one video, “say a few days, or a week, at most.” Milchenko looked nervous.

The train came to a stop at a border-control station. Outside, it was gray and raining. A drug-sniffing dog peeked its head in our cabin, followed by a Ukrainian border guard who appeared to be only a few years older than Milchenko. The guard took our passports and looked over Milchenko’s military registration. He returned with our passports an hour later.

“Klim Milchenko?” the guard asked, reading from the photo page of Milchenko’s passport.

“Yes,” Milchenko replied. “That’s me.”

The guard handed him back his passport without saying a word. The train didn’t leave the station for another two hours. When the steward came by our cabin again, Milchenko asked why we were still sitting there. The steward said it was because two men had been detained. I don’t know who the men were, or if they were allowed back on the train.

The war in Ukraine is a war of attrition. And even before the Trump Administration presented, last week, a twenty-eight-point plan to end it—a plan that, at least in its initial form, would require Ukraine to surrender territory, reduce the size of its military, and promise not to join NATO—Russia, with a population more than three and a half times the size of Ukraine’s, had taken the upper hand. On October 27th, the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, told reporters that Russian troops outnumbered Ukrainian troops eight to one in the ongoing battle for Pokrovsk, a strategically important city in the eastern region of Donetsk. Then, earlier this month, Russian forces took advantage of dense fog to capture fifteen square miles in the neighboring region of Zaporizhzhia. According to Deepstate, a Ukrainian organization that monitors changes on the battlefield, it was Russia’s largest single-day territorial gain of the year.

Elsewhere, Russian missiles have devastated Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, leading to power outages across the country and further demoralizing a public that is increasingly fed up with the war, and whose patience with the Zelensky administration is being tried by a corruption scandal involving a hundred million dollars in kickbacks allegedly paid by contractors in, of all things, the energy sector. Morale among troops is equally, if not more, diminished, as many wait for replacements that have yet to come. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men have gone into hiding or fled abroad to avoid military service. Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service estimates that about seventy have died trying to escape through forests and across rivers. And many of those who have been drafted and sent to the front line have deserted their positions at the first opportunity. “They just start walking west,” a soldier who has been fighting near Pokrovsk told me. “If they don’t get killed by a Russian drone, they’re usually picked up and brought back to the front. Then they wait and try again. No one can make them want to fight.” Between January and October of this year, Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office reportedly opened more than a hundred and eighty thousand cases of desertion and absence without leave, bringing the total since the start of the full-scale invasion to three hundred and eleven thousand.

In the midst of such an acute manpower shortage, the Ukrainian government’s decision to give thousands of young men the option to go abroad has divided military experts. Zelensky has defended the new travel rule by saying that it will help dissuade young men from leaving at an even earlier age. “If we want to keep Ukrainian boys in Ukraine, then we need them to finish school here, and parents must not take them abroad,” he said at a press briefing after the rule went into effect. “But they are beginning to take them abroad before they graduate. And this is very bad, because at that time they lose their connection with Ukraine.” He went on to say that the change would have no impact on the country’s defense capabilities. Simon Schlegel, the Ukraine program director at the Center for Liberal Modernity, in Berlin, told me that while that might be true for now, the new rule could lead to problems in the future. “It narrows the mobilization pool for three years down the road when these men would become eligible,” he said.

The new rule has also been criticized by some of Ukraine’s closest partners. In a phone call on November 13th, the German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, asked Zelensky to do something to prevent so many young Ukrainian men from coming to Germany. They should “serve their country,” Merz said after the call, though he may have his own country in mind, too. Although figures vary, the number of Ukrainian men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two entering Germany rose from nineteen per week in mid-August to between fourteen hundred and eighteen hundred per week in October, per the German Interior Ministry. (Since the war began, Germany has granted what’s known as temporary protection to more than 1.2 million Ukrainians, the most of any country in the European Union.) Poland, too, has seen a major influx of Ukrainian men in the same age range—more than a hundred and twenty-one thousand since the end of August, according to the Polish Border Guard, up from about thirty-four thousand over the previous eight months. Many of those men will pass through Poland on their way to somewhere else, but others, like Milchenko, have decided to stay. “It feels like I’m starting a new life,” he said.

Klim Milchenko by the Oder River.

Photograph courtesy Klim Milchenko

In early November, I went to visit Milchenko in Wrocław. We met at a café across from a KFC in the city’s Old Town. A bronze statue of a gnome, one of more than eleven hundred scattered around the city, stood out front. Milchenko, who is tall and slender, with short light-brown hair, was wearing a black sweater, gray jeans, and sneakers. He was only slightly more relaxed than he had been on the train. Sipping a pumpkin-spice latte, he told me that he had been spending much of his time since arriving in Wrocław looking for work. “I’ve sent my C.V. to thirty different places,” he said. “So far, I’ve only heard back from a swimming pool. I told them that I had worked as a lifeguard in Kyiv, and was certified, but they said they wanted someone else.”

Milchenko speculated that the swimming pool was looking for someone older—or a native Pole. He’d heard stories of Ukrainians in Poland being discriminated against, and worse. In September, someone spray-painted “to the front” on the hood of a Ukrainian woman’s car, and a thirty-two-year-old Polish man was charged with shooting and seriously injuring a Romanian man whom he thought was Ukrainian. Both incidents occurred in Wrocław. Nationwide, polls show that public support for accepting Ukrainian refugees has been slowly but steadily declining. It’s currently at its lowest level since Russia annexed Crimea, in 2014 . Poland’s new President, Karol Nawrocki, has vowed to tighten restrictions on the government support they receive, and the far-right Confederation Party has accused Ukrainian men who moved to Poland of “burdening Polish taxpayers with the costs of their desertion.” (A study conducted by Poland’s National Development Bank found that Ukrainians actually pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits.)

Whatever the reason he was turned down for the job, Milchenko tried not to let it discourage him. “I’m sure I’ll find something,” he said. He was in the process of getting his Polish driver’s license. His mother, who moved to Wrocław in 2019, has a car that she rarely uses. “My mom’s old boyfriend is a taxi-driver,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind doing that.” He also knew a Ukrainian guy who had recently gotten a job at a warehouse in town. “I’m waiting to hear what he thinks of it,” Milchenko said. “If he likes it, I’ll apply there, too.”

After we finished our coffee, Milchenko and I grabbed bagel sandwiches for lunch and walked to the Oder River, which bisects Wrocław. It was a cool, sunny afternoon, and the red-tiled roofs of the city gave way to a bright-blue sky. On our way to the river, we passed a seventeenth-century Baroque church whose foundation stones were pocked with bullet holes from the Second World War. We tried to go inside, but the door was locked. “I came here with my mom once,” Milchenko said. “It’s one of the most beautiful churches I’ve ever seen.” Milchenko had lived in Wrocław on and off for several years before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. During that time, he studied Polish—he now speaks it conversationally—and earned money by delivering food for Uber Eats on his bike and working at an Amazon fulfillment center. He eventually enrolled in a computer-science program at the local campus of a private university. “I had a girlfriend and was starting to make friends,” he said. “It was probably the first time I felt good in Wrocław.” In November of 2021, he went home to Zaporizhzhia to apply for a new passport. Then, three months later, the invasion began, and he was barred from leaving.

Milchenko moved to Kyiv in May of 2023, in part to be farther away from the front line. (At the time, Russian forces were roughly twenty-five miles south of Zaporizhzhia.) He got the lifeguard gig, and spent the first few months on beaches along the Dnipro River. One day, an air-raid alert sounded while he was on duty on Trukhaniv Island. He pointed everyone who was there in the direction of the nearest shelter, but almost no one went. “The alerts had become a part of daily life by then,” he said. “Most people, including me, just didn’t take them seriously.” A few minutes later, a missile exploded in the water about a half mile away, next to a bridge. Milchenko ran into a nearby brick building and waited for the all-clear.

Like almost every Ukrainian I’ve met, Milchenko has become intimately acquainted with tragic and untimely deaths. Most recently, on April 2nd, he told me, a friend of his named Sasha was sitting in his car outside the main train station in Kryvyi Rih, a city in central Ukraine, when a ballistic missile landed nearby. The explosion shattered the car’s windows, spraying Sasha with shards of glass. He was killed instantly. “He had gone to the station to pick up his mom,” Milchenko said. “He was such a good person. He didn’t deserve to die.”

We reached the Oder River, in the middle of Wrocław. Milchenko said he was grateful that the city had a river—and that he could visit it without having to worry about drone and missile strikes. I asked him how his father was doing. “He has some problems with his back,” he said. He’d soon get a medical exam to determine what kind of military duties he could be ordered to fulfill. For now, he was stationed in a small town north of Kyiv, nowhere near the front line.

As we walked across a bridge that led to the northern part of the city, Milchenko asked where I was from in the United States.

“Kansas,” I told him.

“Like Tom Sawyer,” he said.

“No, he’s from Missouri,” I replied. “But it’s right next to Kansas.”

“Have you been to the Mississippi River?” he asked.

“I have,” I said. “It’s huge, like the Dnipro.”

“That’s what I’ve heard,” he said. “I’d love to see it someday.”

Milchenko isn’t sure how long he’ll stay in Poland. He’d like to take a road trip to Paris when he gets his driver’s license, and visit a friend in Germany. He’s also thought about trying to get a job on a crabbing boat in Norway. “I’ve seen videos on Instagram of Ukrainians who do that,” he said. “The work looks hard, but they make a lot of money.” I asked him whether, if the war were to end the next day, he would move back to Ukraine. He was silent for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a hard question. I really don’t know.” ♦

Jeremy Bamber has a new opportunity to clear his name. But will the British justice system acknowledge that it might have gotten this famous case wrong?

New Yorker subscribers get access to all of In the Dark’s previous seasons. Subscribe within Apple podcasts or at newyorker.com/dark.

Imagine, for a moment, that you first heard the name Larry Summers last week, when he showed up on what I’ve called Planet Epstein. That planet is an information ecosystem where all major global events are connected to the sex-trafficking conspiracy that supposedly rules the world. This is a metaphorical place, but not an imaginary one—you can find it on YouTube and in certain corners of TikTok and other social-media platforms. As a moderately informed citizen of Planet Epstein, you have recently learned that Summers set much of the economic policy for three Presidents, including Bill Clinton, whom you already suspected had his own list of mentions in the Epstein files, which you are impatiently, if not optimistically, waiting for the government to fully disclose. You have also learned that Summers, who corresponded with Epstein as late as July, 2019, was previously the president of Harvard University and used his considerable influence not only to bring in money for pet projects—including a poetry initiative spearheaded by his wife—but to help shape the direction of higher education in this country more generally. You learned that this lifelong liberal appeared to be seeking a romantic relationship with a mentee and was asking Jeffrey Epstein for advice about it. You learned that the woman he seemed to be chasing is the daughter of China’s former vice-minister of finance. You even heard that Summers and Epstein had a code name for this Asian woman, Peril—possibly in reference to “Yellow Peril.” (After the exchange between Summers and Epstein was made public, Summers released a statement saying that he was “deeply ashamed” of his relationship with Epstein.) And what have you learned about Summers’s more recent activities? Well, until last week, he was on the board of OpenAI, the company that you believe will shape the entire future of America. And, above all, you learned that the most powerful men in this country are more pathetic, predatory, and corrupt than you or any of your friends.

What conclusions do you draw from your quick introduction to Summers, which, presumably, you stitched together from YouTube Shorts, Wikipedia, and ChatGPT? More to the point, if you believe yourself to be a rational person who draws inferences based on the evidence in front of you, what should you believe?

In the past few months, I have been trying to gauge how much of the American public is now convinced that a cabal of pedophiles runs the world. Polls have shown that a significant majority of the country believes that the government has been hiding information about Epstein’s clients and about his death. But there is a difference between suspecting a coverup and going full Pizzagate-conspiracy mode, drawing connections among Summers, Epstein, Trump, Bill Clinton, Mossad, and the sudden rise of the A.I. industry, which now seems to be propping up a large part of the world economy—and then concluding that some shadowy group of oligarchs rules us all.

There are some indicators, however, that Planet Epstein has begun to eclipse our previous home. Congress, for example, voted 427–1 to mandate that the Department of Justice publish “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” linked to its investigation and prosecution of Epstein. That result owed a good deal to Marjorie Taylor Greene, who used to garner national attention primarily as the butt of jokes, but who, prior to her surprise announcement on Friday that she will resign from office in January, had become one of the most visible—and, yes, increasingly respected—politicians in the country. And the fall of powerful figures such as Summers, who escaped scrutiny in the earlier flareups of the Epstein story, suggests that there is a capitulation taking place. Anecdotally, I do not know a single person in my life who truly thinks that this is the end of the story or that every guilty party has been revealed. More crucially, Trump, who can usually count on a third of the country to accept whatever version of the truth he offers, found almost zero audience for his claim of an “Epstein Hoax”—the narrative that continued attention to Epstein is a Democratic plot to embroil his great Administration in scandal and distract from the “greatness” that Republicans are accomplishing. At the very least, elected officials—including those, such as Greene, who have spent the past decade serving as faithful Trump acolytes—have begun to fear the public’s wrath on this issue.

I believe we are in the middle of a quietly revolutionary moment in this country, which began with the pandemic and the protests stemming from the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. (I suppose that this column is, more than anything, an attempt to chronicle that revolution.) The precipitating factors can be traced back as far as you like, but the shift became evident during the lockdowns, with the sight of millions of people taking to the streets and the displays of supposed capitulation from members of Congress kneeling at the Capitol and major corporations meekly putting out “social-justice” messages on social media—which, of course, occurred alongside red-state fights about quarantines and, later, vaccine mandates. That moment did not lead to a change in the world order, but it decimated whatever authority “the establishment” had left in this country. The subsequent unrest has taken on a variety of forms, including a continued and drastic decline in trust of the traditional news media and attacks on universities from both the left and the right. It was also channelled into Trump’s 2024 campaign, which was less about any one issue than it was about a renewed and utterly hollow promise to drain the swamp all over again.

What that insurrectionary energy sought was a single theory of the world, ideally one that did not rely on partisan leanings—or, really, on politics at all. Epstein has provided that. Lest we forget, Epstein died more than six years ago now, and although the story certainly had not been forgotten by the public, it had at least been moved to a low-heat back burner when Greene; Thomas Massie, a U.S. representative from Kentucky; and a handful of other politicians began to talk about the Epstein files again. The ham-fisted response from the Trump Administration certainly didn’t quiet things. The fact that an increasing number of Americans, spurred on by the war in Gaza and by new-media commentators across the political spectrum, were starting to question the influence that Israel had on Washington, D.C., has also played a role.

A little more than a month ago, I noted that “on Planet Epstein, everything that happens—the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the war in Gaza, the suppression of speech by the Trump Administration—serves as proof that the country is run by blackmail, pedophilia, and fealty to Israel. I do not think very many Americans buy into every part of that story, and I imagine that a great number would be rightfully appalled by the implicit and explicit antisemitism in this view of the world.” In hindsight, I fear that I might have undersold the number of Americans who do believe all those things. I don’t know for sure, of course, as there’s no way to really quantify unrest and suspicion. I also don’t know how, if a good portion of the country now resides on Planet Epstein and wants to upend every American institution, society keeps functioning. What comes next? If you believe that Summers’s extensive appearances in the Epstein files suggest that both Harvard and OpenAI are fundamentally compromised by a child-sex-trafficking ring, and therefore must be burned to the ground, what do you put in their place?

Greene has been the primary political figure to arise out of the Epstein mess, and her sudden resignation only adds another chapter to the conspiracy narrative on Planet Epstein. America loves righteous defectors, and her turn away from Trump—along with her newly measured tone when speaking in big-time media interviews or, last week, in front of the Capitol, flanked with Epstein survivors—turned someone who was an embarrassment into one of the more formidable members of the House of Representatives. On her recent media tour, she spoke frequently about the lack of medical coverage for working Americans and the failures of the Affordable Care Act. In early October, during the government shutdown, she broke ranks with the Republicans and said that she would negotiate with Democrats to keep crucial tax credits that help lower health-care costs. She has also criticized her party for turning its back on “workers,” and though her stance on organized labor isn’t clear—I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one, comrades—she seems to be fashioning an anti-Trump populism that is isolationist in its foreign policy and oriented, in its messaging, toward the working and middle classes. She and Massie have effectively crafted a new set of priorities and litmus tests for conservatives, wherein the most important question is how you feel about Israel and Planet Epstein.

Could Greene, freed from Congress, and in spite of her past nuttiness and humiliations, become the magnet who pulls together the populist right and the populist left? Probably not. But it wouldn’t surprise me if she ran for President in 2028, possibly as the head of an America First party. (In a statement about her impending resignation, she condemned “the Political Industrial Complex of both Political Parties.”) Nor would it shock me if she chose someone from the insurrectionary left as her running mate. (At a press conference last week about the Epstein files, Greene and Massie were joined by Ro Khanna, the left-wing representative from California, and one of the most visible co-sponsors of the recent Epstein bill.) Such a campaign would certainly feature a lot of talk about Epstein and Israel, and would likely call for a new vision of the country that did away with what Greene called traitors who serve “foreign countries and themselves.” How would such a ticket fare against, say, a standard Democratic ticket anchored by a familiar face like Pete Buttigieg or Gavin Newsom? How would this horseshoe campaign do against J. D. Vance? Maybe not so well; political inertia and the two-party system are still powerful forces, despite the Epstein revolution that’s taking place on every smartphone in the country.

But, in the next few years, more politicians will emerge who adopt the crucial positions of this coalition: foreign-policy isolationism and economic populism. Even Zohran Mamdani, who famously said in a mayoral debate that he would not visit Israel because he would be working on New York’s problems—and who pulled off his own unexpected feat on Friday, by charming the President in the Oval Office—adhered, in his campaign, to a version of these tenets. What this suggests is that political life after Trump will be defined by odd ideological pairings that do not follow the political lines of the past twenty years. An abrupt realignment now feels more probable than endless polarization. (Although it’s hard to imagine a political horseshoe that would bend equally toward left and right. More likely, this one will bend toward nativism with lip service paid to widening the public’s social safety net.) Some of the surprises that result from this realignment, such as Mamdani’s unlikely victory, will surely cause both hope and fear, as people grapple with the unexpected. But I do not think that we can fully predict the alliances to come, nor the new order they will bring. ♦

Rea Irvin, the magazine’s first art editor, is best known for creating Eustace Tilley, the monocled dandy whose upturned nose has graced our pages for a hundred years. Irvin established the stylish and refined look of The New Yorker, brought in countless new artists, and also penned many early covers that display his graphic mastery.

Next month, a new book edited by the New Yorker artist R. Kikuo Johnson and the cartoonist Dash Shaw reintroduces one of Irvin’s lesser-known pursuits: “The Smythes,” a Sunday comic page that ran in the New York Herald Tribune and a few other newspapers beginning in 1930. Irvin’s characters followed the form of “Bringing Up Father,” an immensely popular series about an overbearing wife and a put-upon husband written by the master cartoonist George McManus, whose style was itself a tour de force of elegant and well-designed storytelling. In McManus’s strip, much of the humor derives from the juxtaposition between the wife’s class striving and her husband’s contentment with corned beef and cabbage. In Irvin’s world, John and Margie Smythe are both driven by their aspirations to appear sophisticated (perhaps not unlike Eustace Tilley).

The strips, gorgeously composed, with characters dancing elegantly on the page, chronicle Margie’s misguided but ardent worship of her husband. They often deliver gentle punch lines displaying the cartoonist’s affection for the couple’s follies and foibles. Somewhat unsurprisingly, mocking the hapless rich during the Great Depression did not draw a large audience. After five years, Irvin redirected his attention to characters lower on the social ladder—but to no avail. Eventually, in 1936, he retired the strip. It has remained in obscurity until now. In the excerpt below, selected pages offer a playfully wry and tender portrait of married life among the social set.

These images are drawn from “The Smythes.” ♦

Everyone thinks that Thanksgiving is about gratitude and family, but we know what this holiday is really about: astonishing your entire home town with your athletic prowess. The only problem is that, for years, true challengers have been forced to participate in rinky-dink Turkey Trot 5Ks. But no longer. At last, there’s a Thanksgiving race for real competitors: the Iron Turkey.

This intense feat of endurance begins at 4 A.M. sharp with a gruelling, three-mile river swim. And the water isn’t just frigid—it’s thick. Yup, to kick things up a notch, we dumped five thousand pounds of instant mashed-potato powder into that bad boy. It’s mealy, it’s blinding, and you’d better believe it smells crazy.

As you plunge through miles of synthetic spuds, you’ll notice a familiar, grating voice in your ear. That’s right, it’s your Aunt Kath’s third husband, Walt, the one who keeps getting scammed on Facebook. He’ll follow you in a canoe for the entire journey, desperately trying to lead you astray so that he can tell you about a barista who was rude to him.

Think that sounds hard? We’re just getting started.

If you manage to make it through the swim, and to peel off your starchy bathing suit, you’ll begin a hundred-and-twelve-mile uphill bike ride to the most crowded grocery store in America. Along the way, you’ll have to remember fifteen highly specific items that your mom forgot to grab last night. Did she say “thyme” or “lime”? And why does she need steak sauce? It doesn’t matter—she’s furious at your grandma, and if you forget anything she’ll take it out on you.

But that’s not all! As you pedal through twists and turns, you’ll notice a mysterious trio emerging from the wilderness, blocking your path. It’s your three loudest cousins. They’re already drunk on Michelob Ultras, and they’re begging you to play cornhole. You’ll have to distract them by throwing devilled eggs into the woods. But be careful—if they catch an egg in their mouths, it will only make them stronger.

That has to be it, right? Wrong.

The last leg of the Iron Turkey is a full marathon. After the treacherous swim and agonizing bike ride, the run will seem easy. That is, until you sense someone, or something, creeping up behind you. Who’s that dark figure on the horizon? It’s the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Charlie Brown balloon—and he has a knife. Few can outrun Charlie’s blade, and those who do will have to avoid his enormous brown oxfords. This time, when he misses the football, he’ll kick you instead.

Crossing the finish line, you’ll bask in your victory, revelling in the knowledge that while all those losers in your family slept in, you were busy making gains. You were busy winning. And, sure, you won’t be at dinner because you’ll definitely be in the hospital. But at least you have this weird little medal—that’s something to be grateful for. ♦